On 2/3/11 11:46 AM, Henri Verbeet wrote:
On 3 February 2011 18:58, Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.org wrote:
It shouldn't have hacks, but I don't think it's unreasonable to use platform-specific services for things that don't have widely accepted standards.
That was mostly in reply to the general idea of only using Apple provided libraries for no good reason. In fact, if you bring that to its logical conclusion OS X users shouldn't use Wine at all, since those are non-Apple libraries as well.
Sounds like what I said came out wrong. I guess what I really want is not necessarily to totally eliminate external dependencies in Wine but to minimize them. I'd also like to improve system integration, for which using system-provided libraries may or may not help.
The part I'm personally not so convinced of is that this is going to benefit Wine in any way. I'm not buying the argument that it's going to simplify things much for Wine users on OS X. If someone is capable of getting Wine to build and run successfully on OS X, I don't think GnuTLS is going to be much of a problem either. I don't have the impression most OS X users compile Wine themselves anyway though.
The real problem with external dependencies is that right now, if someone were to put together a Wine distribution for Mac OS X, they'd have to go to the trouble of building a number of requisite libraries (which takes additional time), and of maintaining those libraries along with Wine itself. It's just additional work, not to mention the security implications, as Francois Gouget brought up. Judging from the lack of official Mac binaries, few people are willing to put in that work. (Mike Krönenberg is apparently willing, but instead of putting his effort into improving Wine itself, he's decided to make a fancy GUI that the forum people can't support. More power to him, but I'd like to see official Wine binaries. And yes, I have thought about doing that myself, and I know that you're going to say "Then do it" anyway.)
I guess that Henri is right, and this would affect users (except those who do compile Wine themselves) only indirectly, if it does at all. Reducing external dependencies would make it easier on package maintainers, but all users really care about is what they see on the outside. (That would certainly explain why so many Mac Wine users use WineBottler.) I must have lost track of that along the way.
I suppose then that what I really want to see in Wine is total system integration. The end user shouldn't really know or care that he's using Wine. When he double-clicks on a Windows EXE in the Finder, it should just work. (IMHO, It should work that way on Linux, too, and elsewhere.)
Chip